My 11-year-old broke my heart a little over a bowl of cereal yesterday morning.

I'd just gotten one of those newsletters about the best towns in America for fall foliage.

BTW, whoever keeps signing my email up for random shit like this, please stop. Not because I don’t like it, but because I like it TOO much and waste time reading it.

Anyway…. Apparently the winner, the crown jewel, the prom queen of American Fall Towns to swoon over was a place called Woodstock, Vermont.

They ran a photo of it and it was STUNNING. Here’s the photo:

I was smitten. Instantly.

"We have to go here," I announced to the family. Imagine the hikes! The picnics! The Cheese!

Bucket list.

"Let me see," said Adam, mid-Cheerio shoveling.

I showed him.

"That's AI," he said. Without even a pause.

"It is NOT," I said.

"It is." Munch munch munch.

So I pulled up more photos of Woodstock on my phone. Lots of them, and I shoved them at him triumphantly.

He glanced over. "Yeah, all AI."

"Adam," I said, genuinely (and maybe perplexingly) somewhat wounded on behalf of a picturesque little Vermont town I haven’t even visited yet, "not everything beautiful is fake."

He shrugged.

And a little wave of sadness hit me.

Gen Alpha is so screwed, man. They are literally the most cynical, wonderless generation to have ever graced this planet.

Imagine being eleven and already assuming that anything gorgeous you come across online is probably a lie.

That's the water these kids swim in - a nonstop blizzard of fake images, fake videos, fake facts, fake posts, fake PEOPLE.

Of course he dismisses beauty. Beauty's been catfishing him his whole life.

Ever seen a burger that looks like the burgers in ads? Nah, me neither. And I guess that was true in my generation too, but it’s gotten so much worse.

Later, we took a walk to synagogue and on the way, I saw a lovely little scene down a very picturesque side street in the neighborhood. The light was early and golden, and the leaves here are also somewhat starting to turn (I mean, it’s California, not Vermont, but… somewhat!).

I pounced.

"THERE," I said. "Look at that. That's beautiful, and it's real, right in front of you, no AI."

He looked and said, "Yeah, of course that's real."

"How do you know?" I teased him, expecting an eye roll with a side of cynicism like “because it’s not a picture on a screen, mommmmmm…. Duh”

But he actually answered thoughtfully.

"Because there's a telephone pole. And that stop sign's a bit chipped. And it's not… perfect. So obviously it's real."

What my smart, observant 11-year-old was saying is something I say to clients all the time in a different context.

Often, imperfections are how we know things are real.

He knew the pretty scene in front of his eyes was real because he noticed a slightly unsightly telephone pole and a chipped stop sign. It didn’t make the scene ugly to him; it just made it authentic.

The perfect picture I’d shown him at breakfast pinged his radar as a lie, and the little wonky details are what let his guard down.

This is how we feel about our own bodies, our desire, and even our relationships.

Nobody’s body looks perfectly rendered, or smoothed or filtered, professionally lit, and I assure you most people don’t have cat ears and noses. Most people have visible pores.

Real bodies sometimes have birthmarks, two eyes that aren't quite the same colour, one boob that's bigger than the other (everyone, by the way, one is always bigger, this is not breaking news). Some have feet that not even a dedicated foot fetishist would put in his mouth. Or a stray eyebrow hair. Perhaps the odd rogue chin hair (one or two, mind, tweezers exist for a reason)….

Tea-stained teeth (guilty as charged, I personally keep my dentist in two annual cleanings)… One labia longer than the other, which is the anatomical norm and not a defect, despite what the airbrushed magazines and the surgeons who profit from your shame would love you to believe. Abs of meal rather than steel. The occasional bum pimple.

I know people with every single one of those, on every kind of body, who are loved anyway. Wanted anyway. Adored anyway. Often they are adored for the very things they themselves would edit out in a heartbeat.

And yet social media and advertising would have you believe the rendered, filtered version is the standard. It wants you to weigh and measure your real, textured, slightly-wonky self against a thing that does not exist. Against Woodstock-in-AI.

And it makes us all feel crappy. Even when we’re the real deal and not some generated, enhanced composite.

Perfect is sinister, actually.

Flawless doesn't read as beautiful, deep down. It reads as OFF. As Uncanny.

The too-smooth face, the symmetrical everything, the body with no marks and no history, and our gut just knows "…that's not right."

Perfect isn't the top of the scale. Perfect fell off the scale, out the other side, into the uncanny valley, and it's standing there waving at you with too many fingers.

And it goes further than uncanny, actually.

We've been so carpet-bombed with filters and facetune and flawless that our brains have started filtering the filters OUT.

We see ten thousand impossibly smooth faces every month on a variety of platforms, so the eye just… slides off them now. Skims past them. They don’t really land. The more perfect you make yourself look, the more you blend into the endless scroll of perfect and the easier you are to completely ignore.

The flawless filtered selfie you’re agonizing over is going to glance off people like a boring screensaver.

But the real face, the crooked smile, the laugh caught mid-snort, the one that isn't trying to be perfect, THAT stops the scrolling thumb. That's a picture people stop to look at.

So, just…. lean into the suck.

Lean into the not-flawless and for the love of God, stop sanding yourself down.

The stray hair, the soft bit, the wonky angle, the snort- laugh, the awkward dance, leave it IN. It's the most memorable, magnetic, unmistakably-you part of the picture.

Polished is for furniture, or for candlesticks you get out twice a year. It is not for a living, breathing, gorgeously flawed human being who wants to be truly seen and properly touched.

Almost nobody has ever been undone by another person's perfection.

What cracks open a heart are the flaws. Because those are human.

Perfection keeps people at arm's length; it feels kind of fake and unapproachable. Imperfections lead us to lower our guard.

So, this week, when you catch yourself measuring your body, your relationship, your desire against some flawless version and coming up short, I want you to remember my son’s reaction to perfect-looking Woodstock, Vermont.

You're not the AI Woodstock. You're the real street, telephone pole and all. And real is something someone can actually hold.

I know that's easy to read and hard to feel. That's why body image and confidence come up a lot in my sessions with clients.

If your flaws feel like they're standing between you and what you want, let's talk. Book an intro call, and I'll help you see what Adam saw.

Click to book your intro call

Lots of love and happy Sunday,
Sylvie

P.S I still want to go to Woodstock. Adam still isn't sure it exists. I'll have to take him there and find the ugly parts of town to prove it.

P.P.S Last few days to sign up to hear me speak live at the Women's Networking Alliance Fall Mixer! Click below to register.